Film Categories: environment

  • Picture Start

    This lyric brief is a meditation on the natural world, its carefully wrought superimpositions of sky, leaves and chromatic close-ups a powerfully felt evocation of animistic surround. Photographed with a keen eye for detail, Kneller’s painterly overlays collage these moments into a gently flowing homage to the present.

  • Plein Air

    This abstract travelogue flies just over the surface of the Canadian Shield in Northern Ontario. “Plein Air” is an engrossing sonic and visual trip and a continuation of Kerr’s fascination with landscape cinema.

  • It’s Not Brakhage

    It’s Not Brakhage is a feature-length parafiction film, structured around an unnamed narrator’s investigation of a mysterious film reel, believed to be a lost work by experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Shrouded in speculation and actively contested, the film reel is believed to be the sole remaining artifact from a cancelled 1959 film festival, co-organized by Brakhage and military-industrial giant DuPont chemical. The story follows the narrator’s forensic deconstruction of the film reel’s history, sifting through a patchwork of theories and speculations that have arisen since its discovery, and connecting the artifact to DuPont’s wider networks of military-industrial research and artistic…

  • Salvage Archives

    Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems. Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste. As both narrators’ grandiose…

  • Linea ver

    Spring sculpts their fierce emergence. Aspen, cedar, red oak, lichen (and others) phytograms on super-8mm tri-x film. Language: plants

  • diario de verano

    diario de verano is an exploration of neighborhood flora in Tkaronto, focusing on Kensington Market, Parkdale and Wallace – Emmerson, areas we live and move through. Experimentation with abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Artistic practices were explored and shared through gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, creating complex layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities in this short film. Language: plants

  • Black Bird

    Black Bird captures a community of crows living in East Vancouver – commissioned by Echo Park Film Centre North and Cineworks for their Vancouver Minute Project 2021. The project asked filmmakers to reflect on living in so-called Vancouver, BC. Brittney chose to focus on their current and past relationship with the crows in the city. Growing up in East Van they remember seeing the magic of the sky being filled with hundreds of crows every night as they made their daily migration back to Burnaby Lake. When they reflect on their experience growing up and living in East Van the…

  • Phosphene

    Phosphene searches for the harmony between the acoustics and the image of sound. The film’s soundscape comprises natural and industrial sounds from the west coast of Canada. Inspired by these sounds, the image was created through cymatics – a process that visualizes sound vibrations through various liquid mediums.

  • Two or Three Saprophytes

    Two or Three Saprophytes is a video essay that traces a speculative history of the industrial revolution, its ecological backdrop, and its intellectual legacy of growth-based thinking. Breaking from strictly didactic or documentary forms, the film defracts its historical research through a hallucinatory poetic lens, mixing critique and fantasy to frame the interconnected histories of mushrooms, trees, coal, chemicals, machines, and capitalists as a kind of ecological ghost story. Visual and textual motifs of circles, spirals, hexagons, and “revolutions” punctuate the film, sketching associations and contrasts between historical movements, economic patterns, rotational pistons, chemical diagrams, and ecological balance. Posing a…

  • Maybe…EARTH

    It is very easy to die on Mars. Yet the race to the cold, dark and oxygen-deprived planet has never been stronger. Maybe it’s some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy driven by billionaires. Maybe plants can help break the spell. Maybe…EARTH.